Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough is Lecturer in Medieval History and Literature at Durham University. She studied Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at the University of Cambridge before taking up a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of Oxford. In 2013 she was chosen as one of ten BBC Radio 3 New Generation Thinkers, in a competition to find young academics with the potential to turn their research into programmes for broadcast. Since then, she has presented BBC radio documentaries on subjects including the supernatural north, fire in Scandinavian culture, apocalypses, and Nordic identity.

Eleanor will be the opening event for Faclan’s evening of Tìrean Deighe is Teine: Lands of Ice and Fire on Friday 27 October

 

Beyond the Northlands: Viking Voyages and the Old Norse Sagas

  • A fascinating voyage to the furthest edgelands of the Viking world via the drama of the Old Norse sagas – from the bleak landscapes of the Arctic Circle to medieval Constantinople, pre-Columbus north America to Kievan Rus
  • Places the rich confusion and fantasy of the sagas in the illuminating context of an array of other evidence, from rune-stones and ruins to texts from Byzantium and Baghdad
  • Includes vivid descriptions of the actual landscapes discovered, explored and inhabited by the Norsemen
  • Enables readers to understand the Norsemen like never before, as if they were travelling with them on their adventures to far-flung corners of the world